Wow, a lengthy post, 80-something comments and still more confusion than clarity.
One comment tells you about all you need to know:
This is what a password looks like on disk in a Unix system:
$1$RsDzxp4K$y6ARJtx/TRDYnPWp.3vGy/
Three pieces of information delimited by $ signs. "1" is the hash algorithm (MD5 when using crypt() function as in this case). "RsDzxp4K" is the salt (just a simple random string). "y6ARJtx/TRDYnPWp.3vGy/" is the result of hashing the plaint text password with the algorithm specified and using the salt. This can all be stored in one field in the DB (no need to split into separate columns). It's useful to store the algorithm specification with the password to facilitate switching in the future. Bcrypt is better than SHA which is better than MD5.

The web is nothing if not a maze of user accounts and logins. Almost everywhere you go on the web requires yet another new set of credentials. Unified login seems to elude us at the moment, so the status quo is an explosion of usernames and passwords for every user. As a consequence of all this ...

I think the problem is that people are over-optimistic about time, knowingly or not. That's why the best thing to do is say where you are: "just leaving the starbucks at kearney and sutter" or "just got off 101/80 at the 4th st exit" or "looking for parking", etc.

People are really bad judges of little time. And they often don't signal their intentions appropriately. My friend Alexandra Wolfe pointed this out to me recently when she noted that people always say that they are running "5 minutes late" or that they will "be there in 5 minutes." But what do...

I predict the opposite. More free dailies like the Palo Alto Daily and San Francisco Examiner. With high fixed costs and low variable costs you want to maximize readership. Trying to play in the high cost world is a losing proposition for most.

On Monday of this week, I posted about changes in the magazine industry and the trade-offs of circulation revenue versus advertising revenue. In essence, higher prices to users (via subscriptions and cover price) results in a higher value audience which results in higher CPMs to advertisers. Of...

There's a truism in Silicon Valley that Peter Thiel describes in my book: No publicly-traded Internet company stays on top for more than four years. We saw it with Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, and I think we started seeing the beginnings of it with Google at the end of 2008. The company reports earnin...